When did Saudi end slavery?
1962 Slavery is abolished in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Is slavery legal in Saudi Arabia?
There appears to be no legislation in place in Saudi Arabia which prohibits slavery, although slavery may form an element of an offence of trafficking under articles 2 and 3 of the 2009 Law for Combating Crimes of Trafficking in Persons.
Susan Abulhawa, who grew up in America writes in Aljazeera:
In many Arab nations, including Kuwait where I was born, workers are lured into menial jobs where their passports are confiscated upon arrival and they are forced into humiliating and often inhuman working conditions. They have little to no protection under the law and are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, including extraordinarily long working hours, withholding of salaries, sexual, mental, and physical abuse, and denial of travel.
The recent case of Alem Dechesa brought to light the horrors faced by migrant workers in Lebanon. Dechesa, a domestic worker from Ethiopia, committed suicide after suffering terrible mental and physical abuse at the hands of her Lebanese employers, whose savage beating of her in front of the Ethiopian Consulate went viral last year.
From the article: Recalling Africa’s harrowing tale of its first slavers – The Arabs
Figures on the Arab slave trade in Africa are hard to come by, but the historian Paul Lovejoy estimates that some 9.85 million Africans were shipped out as slaves to Arabia and, in small numbers, to the Indian subcontinent. Lovejoy breaks his figures down as follows:
Between AD 650 and 1600, an average of 5,000 Africans were shipped out by the Arabs. This makes a rough total of 7.25 million.
Then, between 1600 and 1800, another 1.4 million Africans were shipped out by the Arabs. The 19th century represented the highest point of the Arabian trade where 12,000 Africans were shipped out every year. The total figure for the 19th century alone was 1.2 million slaves to Arabia.
According to Lovejoy, another 4.1 million Africans were shipped across the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf and India. “This trade also, with the notable exception of some Portuguese involvement in the area of Mozambique, and of 18th and 19th century French exports to islands under their control in the Indian Ocean, was largely conducted by Muslims,” adds Duncan Clarke.
Through out the 19th century, the Omani Arab rulers of Zanzibar shipped hundreds of thousands of African slaves to work on clove plantations on the island. It was this trade that gave Europe and America so much satisfaction, after abolishing their own trade in African slaves, to highlight the wickedness of the Arab slavers who continued to enslave Africans well into the first decades of the 20th century. Even to this day, Arab slavers are still at work in Sudan and Mauritania, buying and selling black Africans.
David Livingstone, the British missionary/traveller/explorer was so upset by the way the Arabs treated their African slaves that he wrote back home in 1870:
“In less than I take to talk about it, these unfortunate creatures — 84 of them, wended their way into the village where we were. Some of them, the eldest, were women from 20 to 22 years of age, and there were youths from 18 to 19, but the large majority was made up of boys and girls from 7 years to 14 or 15 years of age.
A more terrible scene than these men, women and children, I do not think I ever came across. To say that they were emaciated would not give you an idea of what human beings can undergo under certain circumstances. “Each of them had his neck in a large forked stick, weighing from 30 to 40 pounds, and five or six feet long, cut with a fork at the end of it where the branches of a tree spread out. “T he women were tethered with bark thongs, which are, of all things, the most cruel to be tied with. Of course they are soft and supple when first striped off the trees, but a few hours in the sun make them about as hard as the iron round packing-cases. The little children were fastened by thongs to their mothers. “As we passed along the path which these slaves had travelled, I was shown a spot in the bushes where a poor woman the day before, unable to keep on the march, and likely to hinder it, was cut down by the axe of one of these slave drivers. “We went on further and were shown a p lace where a child lay. It had been been recently born, and its mother was unable to carry it from debility and exhaustion; so the slave trader had taken this little infant by its feet and dashed its brains out against one of the trees and thrown it in there.”
Source: https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/